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How Ticketmaster accelerated innovation with the help of CoreOS Tectonic

Today's fast-moving enterprises have an urgent need to modernize their IT operations, and increasingly they are choosing Kubernetes as a tool to help them meet that challenge. At CoreOS, we're proud that Ticketmaster, a Live Nation Entertainment brand, has chosen our Tectonic enterprise-ready Kubernetes platform to help it transform into a digital business to meet and exceed the needs of its clients and fans.

Behind the brand, Ticketmaster is a Global 2,000 enterprise that operates 21 separate ticketing systems and 250 unique products, hosting applications out of seven data centers and in the AWS public cloud worldwide. The Ticketmaster systems and platforms are a critical part of Live Nation's ability to put on a live event somewhere in the world every 20 minutes. And every month, Ticketmaster’s collective online properties pay host to 80 million unique visitors – and that traffic is only accelerating.

This increasing velocity presented Ticketmaster with a challenge. Its original infrastructure was unable to keep pace with the demands of its growing business. With competitors emerging on every side, Ticketmaster needed to deliver more products and better features, faster. To do that, it needed to modernize, and changing the way it built, deployed, and managed applications was the first step.

From legacy to Kubernetes

"It all started with containers," explains Justin Dean, Ticketmaster's SVP for platform and operations. "Ticketmaster recognized that our complex, legacy-based stack just couldn't keep up with the accelerating velocity of our business. But just containerizing our applications wasn't enough. We were still spending 30-50 percent of our time writing software to deploy software, instead of writing software to make money. And about half of our outages were based on our original technology – and therefore preventable."

Ticketmaster needed a container orchestration layer, and it chose Kubernetes as the leading solution. Building and deploying its own Kubernetes clusters was still consuming too many IT resources, however, which is why Ticketmaster turned to CoreOS Tectonic, the enterprise-ready Kubernetes platform.

"Ticketmaster chose to partner with CoreOS because it gave us instant, enterprise-level confidence in the Kubernetes stack," Dean says. "CoreOS's expertise and its deep ties to the open source Kubernetes community mean that when Ticketmaster runs into integration problems, we're not on our own. CoreOS can support us on the most granular level. And the automated operations the Tectonic platform provides frees up our teams to focus on how to optimize systems, where before they would have spent that time simply deploying them."

What's more, moving to Tectonic has resulted in significant productivity gains for Ticketmaster. For example, deployments that used to take 20 minutes now take just 60 seconds.

What's more, you have the opportunity to speak with representatives from both CoreOS and Ticketmaster at the Open Source Summit North America conference in Los Angeles this month. Stop by the CoreOS booth on September 11-13 to hear firsthand how Ticketmaster is continuing to bring its enterprise workloads to Kubernetes on the Tectonic platform.

And if you want to try out CoreOS's enterprise-ready Kubernetes platform for yourself, you can deploy a Tectonic cluster of up to 10 nodes for free. Sign up here for a trial license, or see our set of exclusive tutorials for deploying clusters on AWS and Azure.